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BSA to go
By Steven | May 6, 2026
So the government has decided to abolish the BSA. Various people are crowing about it. They are pointing to the BSA’s decision to hear a complaint against internet broadcaster The Platform. ACT says this was an attempt to “police the internet… to stretch a law written for rabbit-ear TVs over podcasts and livestreams”.
It’s hard to know whether this is deliberately misleading scaremongering or just garden variety ignorance. But of course, the BSA decision had nothing to do with podcasts, or in fact any part of the internet that was not a live-streaming New Zealand broadcaster. That seems to be a category of one… The Platform. Which, of course, was doing exactly what other broadcasters were doing, minus only the discipline that broadcasting standards might have brought to … I don’t know, a decision to phone someone up and put them on air without telling them.
But you can read my take on the BSA’s decision below (short version: I think their interpretation of the law requiring them to hear the complaint was correct and would likely have been upheld by the High Court).
But for now, what should we make of the government’s decision?
First thing: it’s not clear to me whether this will be passed by the election. I’m inclined to think it shouldn’t be, in part to give time for proper debate, and in part because it would make sense to make this an election issue. Also, they have jurisdiction to hear complaints about the falsity of election advertisements.
Let’s say they do pass it, under urgency I imagine. I still have questions. Apparently the Media Council is supposed to just pick up the slack here. How do they feel about this? Another hundred plus complaints a year? Where will they get the resources? The members are volunteers. They have one staff member. There’s no government funding.
Might they need to tweak the standards so that they work for broadcasters too? And why would you choose them to do this? The members of the Media Council are members of the public, a judge, and print media types. What do they know about broadcasting?
Another thing: will the broadcasters join? It’s not mandatory. The Platform isn’t a member.
Also, guess who’s more likely to uphold a complaint? Hint: it’s not the BSA. At present, the Media Council is two or three times more likely to uphold any given complaint than the BSA.
That’s partly because (irony alert) the BSA takes the right to freedom of expression under the NZ Bill of Rights Act very seriously. The Media Council … not so much. At least, they barely mention it (though the media’s right to freedom of expression is part of its Statement of Principles). They have no process to follow to ensure that any upheld complaint amounts only to a proportionate restriction on free speech. They are in a legal grey area where they are not part of the government, but are performing government-like functions. Does the Bill of Rights even apply to them? (I think it does, but I’m not sure the Media Council agrees).
The BSA’s jurisprudence provides a pretty clear set of guidelines for what can be broadcast and what shouldn’t be. The Media Council’s Statement of Principles is much more vague, and its decisions (which are generally good!) are wafflier. It’s harder to extract useful guidance from them.
There’s no appeal from a Media Council decision.
It’s possible that this will produce other unwelcome consequences too. If you are treated unfairly by a broadcaster (including The Platform), your first instinct might be to go to a complaints body. But if there isn’t one, your only alternative might be to sue. There will not always be a remedy (there isn’t a general law requiring fairness, for example) but defamation might often be available. (I have often advised clients thinking of defamation to consider the BSA or Media Council instead).
One defamation case is likely to cost a media defendant far more than the sum total of all the annual costs of handling BSA cases.
That’s also bad for another reason. Not many people have the wherewithal to bring a lawsuit. So many of the breaches will just go unaddressed.
What is likely to happen, I expect, is that a non-member broadcaster will do something terrible and it will be a scandal that there’s no standards regime and the government will have to reinvent one.
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